TRAVELOG:
- 13 Jan: Up the Saigon River to Ho Chi Minh City
- 14 Jan: Fly to Siem Reap Cambodia, Lake Tonle Sap
- 15 Jan: Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, jungle temple, fly to Phnom Penh
- 16 Jan: Phnom Penh, Genocide Museum, River Boat, Vietnamese Border
- 17 Jan: Chau Doc, Forest, River, Island Guest House
- 18 Jan: Bicycle Ride, Cai Be Crafts, Bus to Saigon, Embark Ship
On 13 January, we arrived in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam after poking around in the Gulf of Thailand for a week or so. The sheltered waters west of Cambodia were calm and our extended stay there gave us an opportunity for students to settle into life on the ship and begin their classes. In Global Studies we taught about the geography and history of the region and tried to prepare voyagers with academic context for their 6-day visit to Vietnam.
Following a rough night of moderate waves we turned into the Saigon River at Vung Tau, where a gigantic statue of Jesus on the Rocks greets mariners. It took several hours to sail upstream through dense mangrove forests before reaching the city. Ho Chi Minh City is home to more than 15 million people, roughly twice the population of New York. Imagine motoring into New York harbor but instead of factories and suburbs, being surrounded by dense forests for 50 miles! The mangrove preserve protects the city from storm surge and typhoons.
We disembarked and took a grab downtown to do some last-minute shopping and then returned to the ship to get some rest before meeting at 4:45 am to depart on a 5-day “field program,” a curated educational trip provided by Semester at Sea for extra cost.
Our program was called “Life Along the Mekong River.” Twenty-three of us left the ship: nine students and 14 older adults, mostly “LifeLong Learners” plus some faculty and student-life staff. We flew to Siem Reap Cambodia near Angkor Wat. Then we spent five days and four nights returning along the Mekong as it flows downstream through Cambodia, into Vietnam, and then through the vast Delta almost to the sea. Finally, we returned to the ship by bus on 18 January just in time to depart for Malaysia. The fast-paced days were just packed! Five days felt like 10, with early starts and late arrivals by bus at hotels.
14 January: Siem Reap and Lake Tonle Sap
The flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Siem Reap took just under an hour. Siem Reap is the second city of Cambodia with a population of about 300,000 people. It’s a major tourist destination due to its location near the gigantic ancient temple complex around Angkor Wat. Tourism comprises around 40% of the entire Cambodian economy and the city is quite prosperous.
After checking into our lovely hotel, we boarded a bus for an hour-long ride to a gigantic lake called Tonle Sap. The lake is about 100 km long by 60 km wide. It dominates the map of Cambodia in the northwest. Over 200 species of freshwater fish thrive in the lake. Prodigious fish catches in the lake and intensive rice cultivation in the hinterland provide the agricultural and economic lifeblood of the region. More than 1.2 million people live in the provinces bordering the lake, but the area is very rural with almost nobody connected to electricity or water/wastewater treatment.
Tonle Sap is an inland freshwater sea, stretching far beyond the horizon. Incredibly, it’s fed entirely by seasonal overflow from the Mekong River. The mighty river flows more than 4000 km down from the Tibetan Plateau carrying the runoff from the Asian Monsoon from China down through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. So much water flows down the channel in northern summer that it overflows upstream into the Tonle Sap tributary. The tributary flows backward for 160 miles during the rainy season, filling the humongous lake near Siem Reap. Then the river reverses and the lake drains back down toward the mainstem Mekong for the rest of the year.
The shoreline of the great lake is lined with small houses on enormous wooden pilings rising 40 feet or more out of the water. The lake is 12 meters deep at the end of the rainy season but less than 2 meters deep at the end of the dry season, quadrupling in area when the river runs backward. Water laps through the floorboards of the houses in September which are then 4 stories above the lake in April!
We set out in small boats from the village and motored through dense wetlands below the towering houses. Beyond the land-based village are clusters of floating houses where people live at the surface of the water. These floating villages rise and fall with the seasons. Each home has a tiny boat. Children learn to swim and walk at the same time. They attend floating schools to which they are ferried by their families.
Over the past 20 years, the Chinese government has constructed the first 10 of 21 colossal hydroelectric dams on the Mekong upstream of Cambodia. The seasonal monsoon flow of the river has dropped dramatically. The reversing river into Lake Tonle Sap has waned and peak lake levels have fallen. As a result, the shallow lake water has become much warmer during the dry season. The annual fish catch has fallen 85% in 20 years, threatening not just the livelihoods of 1.2 million people who live on the shores of Tonle Sap but the entire Cambodian economy.
After we returned to the city, we met up with my college roommate Myron Buck. He’s living in Siem Reap as an expatriate. Myron spent most of his life teaching around the world and loves living in Asia. He rents a 3-bedroom house in Siem Reap for $300/month. It was great to reconnect with him! We had a lovely dinner and then went to bed early.
15 January: Angkor Temple Complex
The following day we woke very early and departed for Angkor Wat at 4:45 AM. Our guides led us through the warm humid dark by flashlight to the edge of a dark lake. We sat in a gathering crowd amid morning birdsong as the dawn slowly broke to reveal the famous spires of the ancient temple complex reflected in the surface of the lake. Absolutely lovely and awe-inspiring!
Angkor Wat was the center of a vast empire from about 800 to 1431 CE. At its height in the 13th Century, well over a million people lived here. The famous temple is today the largest religious structure on Earth, yet there are eight other neighboring temples of similar size spread over a huge area.
Besides monumental architecture, the capital city of the Khmer Empire featured massive systems of canals and aqueducts to supply water, carry away waste, and irrigate an incredibly productive system of rice paddies that fed millions of people across Southeast Asia. A millennium ago this was one of the great capitals of the world at a time when the populations of Paris, London, and Rome were perhaps 20 times smaller. The Empire spanned nearly all of what is now Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia as well as a big chunk of what’s now Vietnam.
The temple is designed geometrically to align with the cardinal directions. Its geometry defines an inner sacred world that is separate from and yet connected to the outside. Its design is both religious and secular. It’s for worship and civil defense and residence and the provision of food and water.
After the fall of the Khmer Empire in the 15th Century, the temple complex fell into disrepair and was largely overgrown by the surrounding forest. The French colonial fantasy is that it was “lost” and subsequently “discovered” by European archaeologists. The locals knew all along where and what the complex was as well as the complex history that led to its creation and downfall. They simply lost the political and economic power to maintain it.
The temple has been lovingly cleaned of vegetation and restored by historians and artisans. The art and architecture inside is magnificent! The towers/stupas are 65 meters high (about 20 stories), arranged in a huge square around the central trio. The square is lined with four galleries of intricate carvings of scenes from the two great Hindu epics: Ramayana and Mahabharata. Exquisitely visible and compelling after nearly 900 years!
The entire complex was deeply Hindu, with the three central towers serving to venerate Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu. Over a period of centuries, Hinduism was gradually supplanted both in court and in larger Khmer culture by Buddhism. In the 12th Century, the images of the Hindu trinity were replaced with statues of the Buddha to resanctify the temple according to the new faith.
Ironically, by the time of this “Buddhification” of Angkor Wat, Buddhism was a spent force in India from which it originated. Hinduism has been deeply hierarchical for millennia, with not just religious ceremony but all of society fulfilling tightly controlled roles to which people were born. Buddhism arose in the 6th Century BCE and swept the ancient world with a philosophy of universal access to Enlightenment without the need for a priestly class of intercessors between people and the Divine. From about 300 BCE to the early 1st Millennium CE, Buddhism was ascendant across South Asia.
Over the centuries though, Indian Buddhism gradually reverted to the older social order, with layer upon layer of Bodhisaatvas, saints, and intercessors that mediated the path toward Enlightenment. By the second Millennium CE Hinduism had returned as the basis for religious and social structure across South Asia. But a smaller purist or fundamentalist form of Buddhism (Theravada) emerged and became the state religion in Sri Lanka. From there this more direct form of individual seekers spread across Southeast Asia as well as by land across trading routes (“Silk Roads”) to China and eventually Japan and Korea. Even as India re-embraced the Hindu pantheon, Angkor spread Buddhism across the many societies in its giant Khmer footprint.
We visited Angkor Wat for about four hours and then returned to the hotel for breakfast at midmorning.
In the afternoon, we visited neighboring Angkor Thom and the Bayon Temple within. Angkor was sacked by the Cham in 1177 and the later emperor Jayavarman VII relocated the capital next door to Angkor Thom. Although he was Hindu, many of his subjects were Buddhist and he sought to unify both faiths by building both Hindu and Buddhist wings of the new temple at Bayon. The art and architecture reflect this multifaith unity, though the temple is in much worse condition -- less restored compared to Angkor Wat.
Our guide explained that the unification of Hindus and Buddhists under Jayavarman VII led the Khmer to their apex of their influence across the region. But his nephew and successor Jayavarman VIII renounced the unification project, ruling as a militant Hindu. He ordered the Buddhist wing of Bayon defaced and persecuted Buddhists throughout the empire. The resulting strife led to a gradual decline of the Khmer Empire. By the late 14th Century agricultural production had declined to the point that food shortages plagued the capital. Mass migration to neighboring Ayutthaya (modern Thailand) led to the abandonment of Angkor in 1431.
In late afternoon we visited Ta Prohm, yet another monumental temple in the Angkor complex. Ta Prohm was finished around 1186. Unlike Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, restoration efforts have been limited to preserve the overgrown appearance from 150 years ago. The ruins have been stabilized enough to safely allow visitors but remain wrapped in the roots of gigantic strangler figs and other trees and vines. It’s beautiful and evocative. I saw the temple depicted in my childhood as a refuge for monkeys in the original Disney cartoon “The Jungle Book.” My kids generation saw it in the film and video game “Tomb Raider.”
After Angkor was abandoned in 1431, our guide explained that there was a lot of war and “sacking” back and forth over the subsequent centuries between the Khmer, Thai and Champa in what’s now Vietnam. The divided, weakened states were then defeated across Southeast Asia by Napoleon’s forces around 1800. The region was colonized by the French as “Indochine” in 1867.
Cambodia was overrun, the French were defeated, and the region was ruled by the victorious Japanese during World War 2. After Japan was in turn defeated at the end of the War, Indochine demanded independence from France. Indochine waged a successful war of independence. Cambodia became an independent kingdom in 1953 under King Norodom Sihanouk and enjoyed a decade of rejuvenation until the American-Vietnamese War in the mid-1960s.
At the end of a very long day at Angkor, we drove an hour to the Siem Reap airport and flew a few hundred miles south to Cambodia’s Capital city Phnom Penh. By the time we dragged ourselves into a new hotel at 10 PM, we’d had 17 hours of continuous program. We were exhausted!
 |
| In the 12th & 13th Century, the Cambodian Khmer Empire included most of Southeast Asia |
16 January Morning: Cambodian Genocide Museum
The following morning, we ate breakfast and checked out of the hotel. Phnom Penh is a much bigger city than Siem Reap, with a population of almost 2.5 million. We visited the gorgeous royal temple complex in early morning and then went to the Museum of the Cambodian Genocide.
 |
| Early morning at the Royal Temple in Phnom Penh, before our hearts were broken at the Cambodian Genocide Museum |
TRIGGER WARNING: The Genocide Museum is absolutely heartbreaking. If you don’t want to know, skip the following.
Between 1976 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot brutally tortured and murdered about 25% of all Cambodians, nearly 3 million people. Truly this was one of the great crimes in a long human history of terrible violence and hatred.
The museum in Phnom Penh was one of 157 torture prisons all over Cambodia. Because it was located in the Capital, this one specialized in the interrogation of officials of the former government. To forestall the possibility of future revenge attacks, the Pol Pot regime routinely targeted entire extended families, leaving no survivors.
Prisoners were brutally and viciously tortured, sometimes for weeks, before being taken out to the killing fields to be killed by being clubbed to death. Many gave false confessions of imagined crimes and implicated others, whose families were then targeted in turn.
The museum/prison was previously an elementary school and is still obviously so. Classrooms were converted to horrific mass incarceration where prisoners were kept manacled hand and foot between interrogation sessions. Playground equipment in the yard was converted to torture scaffolds. Prisoners who lost consciousness during interrogation were publicly submerged headfirst into tanks of excrement to wake them up for more.
A sign in Cambodian script hangs in the former school yard. It’s translated into English as follows:
DISCIPLINE OF THE SECURITY
1. You must answer according to my questions. Don't turn them away.
2. Don't try to hide the facts by making excuses about this or that. You are strictly prohibited to contradict me.
3. Don't pretend to be ignorant, for you are a chap who dares to thwart the revolution.
4. You must answer my questions immediately without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don't go on about your minor mistakes or infringements of the moral code or on the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must absolutely not scream or cry out.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet, and when I tell you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don't make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secrets or your betrayals.
9. If you don't scrupulously follow all the above rules, you shall get many lashes or electric shocks.
- For every infringement, 10 lashes or 5 shocks.
Regime officials produced closeup photographs of the faces of every victim. The faces of men, women, and children stare in abject misery and terror from the walls of the museum. I will never unsee them. Tears ran down my cheeks and snot ran from my nose.
How could such an unfathomable horror happen?
I had a vague inkling of events in my childhood and teens, and learned more later. The history is quite complex. Our Cambodian guides did a wonderful job explaining the tragedy, yet of course I can only sketch the broadest outline here.
The emergence of free Cambodia after the defeat of the French in 1953 led to a democratic constitution in which King Norodom Sihanouk was relegated to a ceremonial figurehead. He abdicated the throne to his own father in 1955 to enter civilian politics, founding the Cambodian Socialist Party.
By the 1960s three political factions had coalesced, each represented by a color. The ruling “blue” party was strongest in the cities. They were peacefully opposed by a “white” monarchist party that supported greater power for the royal family. Blue and white factions allied to rule as a coalition government drawing support from both wealthy elites and a rising middle class of urban professionals and government workers. A rural insurgency of peasant farmers and villagers was led by the “red” Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK, also known as Khmer Rouge).
This “red, white, and blue” dynamic gives me a terrible chill of recognition.
The Khmer Rouge dominated the countryside with an escalating drumbeat of resentment toward urban elites and modernization. They built a violent insurgency led by Pol Pot.
During the American-Vietnamese War in the 1960’s, the North Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and allied with the Khmer Rouge. Together they established the Ho Chi Minh Trail through the forests of eastern Cambodia which nurtured and carried guerrillas (Viet Công) into the mountains of South Vietnam.
In response, the US carpet-bombed eastern Cambodia to suppress the Viet Cong. They developed networks of spies and infiltrators to destabilize the Khmer Rouge and prop up the centrally Blue/White coalition in Phnom Penh. The King tried to remain neutral in what was becoming a deadly civil war. He was deposed by a US-led coup in 1970 in which the US-backed blue faction was victorious. Lon Nol became Prime Minister, ruling Cambodia with both overt and covert US support from 1970-1975.
The government of Mao Tse Tung and Chou En Lai invited the deposed king to China and offered the royal White faction both political and military support. The king allied the royalist White faction to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge against Lon Nol and the Blue faction. Pol Pot leveraged the popularity of the monarchy to build power and launch a Maoist Revolution. The Khmer Rouge mobilized rural youth against the wealthy and professional urban elites.
In the early 1970’s, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong steadily advanced against South Vietnam and the US military. Millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of US soldiers died. The US public turned decisively against the war, and the US withdrew in humiliation in 1973. South Vietnam surrendered in 1975 and the country was unified under the Communists with the capital in Hanoi.
The guerrilla forces of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge swept into the capital Phnom Penh and deposed Lon Nol in 1975. The King was invited to return from Chinese exile but was just as powerless as his son had been in the late 1950s. He was placed under house arrest in the palace and many of the royal family were executed.
In a grim reflection of the Maoist Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities and forced the entire population into the countryside to be “reeducated” by forced agricultural labor. Communist Vietnam was tightly aligned with the USSR, which was also fighting a second Cold War against China. Cambodia was crawling with Soviet KGB and US CIA agents attempting to swing events to the advantage of the superpowers. The USSR-sponsored Vietnamese government and 200,000 Viet Cong turned on their former allies in the Khmer Rouge.
Blue faction officials in Phnom Penh and their families were immediately arrested, interrogated, tortured, and murdered. Intellectuals, businessmen people, doctors, lawyers, and others were specifically targeted along with their children. In the vast countryside diaspora, refugees and their families were targeted for wearing eyeglasses, speaking with urban accents, or being unable to perform hard labor.
As genocide swept the country, the targets grew and grew. Khmer Rouge officials fingered one another as KGB or CIA or Vietnamese agents. Purge after purge converted torturers and interrogators into victims. The chaos lasted from 1976 through 1979 and killed 1 in every 4 Cambodians. An equivalent catastrophe in the US would kill more than 80 million people.
In 1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia with the support of the USSR. The king was freed from captivity and deposed the regime. It was the end of the genocide but not the end of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In retalitaion, China invaded Vietnam from the north. Vietnam occupied Cambodia until 1990, but many regime officials fled into the forest with force of arms.
Civil and military strife continued until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. The War finally came to an official end with a peace treaty brokered by France and Indonesia and elections in 1993. Hung Sen, a former Pol Pot captain who had defected to Vietnam returned and became Prime Minister of Cambodia. He’s been the political leader of Cambodia ever since, now for almost 40 years.
More than 20,000 men, women, and children were tortured and interrogated At the prison that is now the Cambodian Genocide Museum. There were just 11 survivors: seven men and three children. Two are still alive. We met one of them at the museum. His name is Loung Ung and he’s 94 years old. A former mechanic, his life was spared when he repaired the typewriter of the official who was interrogating him. He sits at a table in the shade of a tree and recounts his story to visitors.
You can learn much much more about the Cambodian Genocide from the following books and films:
- “First They Killed my Father,” by Loung Ung
- “The Killing Fields,” by Christopher Hudson
- “Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare,” by Philip Short
Meditate on the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. Love your political opponents. Be good to one another.
 |
| Forced diaspora from all Cambodia cities in 1976-1978 |
 |
| Only seven adult survivors of 20,000 prisoners at the torture facility in Phnom Penh |
 |
| Survivor Loung Ung, 94 years old, speaks to our group. Repairing his interrogator’s typewriter saved his life |
16 January Afternoon/Evening: Down the Mekong River to Vietnam
After our visit to the Genocide Museum, we picked our injured souls up from the dirt and got back on our bus. We were treated to a wonderful lunch and then boarded a large enclosed speedboat at the Phnom Penh pier to begin a 5-hour trip down the Mekong River into Vietnam.
The boat was surprisingly comfortable and many of our group slept. I watched as we motored down the center of the enormous river past forests, farms, and industrial areas. Huge boats carrying a variety of heavy freight passed us going both upstream and down.
About 4 pm we stopped at a border checkpoint where we surrendered our passports to Cambodian officials to process our visas. Without passports, we got back on our boat and motored maybe a kilometer downstream to get off again at the Vietnamese border checkpoint.
We waited to be cleared by immigration in a small convenience store at the border. Some of the students bought soft drinks and snacks. It was very hot and humid so we sat outside on a deck above the river. A second boat pulled up and about 25 Israeli tourists joined us in the waiting area. Then nothing happened for a long time. People started getting bored and hot and tired and grumpy.
It turned out that the computer system for processing immigration checks had failed across all of Vietnam! Tens of thousands of people were stranded at airports and border checkpoints across the country. We were lucky. We had plastic chairs and bags of potato chips. Imagine flying 16 hours across the Pacific and being stuck in endless unmoving lines at passport control in Saigon!
Our students were wonderful! With some timely encouragement from faculty and staff, they made a game of our stranding. We bought one of almost every kind of junk food in the convenience store and did stupid “toasts” with them across the plastic tables. We took lots of pictures and told jokes and stories as the night came on. It was like summer camp.
We weren’t going anywhere without our passports. Not on into Vietnam and not back into Cambodia. We wondered how long the junk food would last. We wondered whether we’d have to sleep in the chairs. Luckily, our guide was Vietnamese not Cambodian so he was able to get a Grab into a nearby town and come back with sandwiches.
Finally, around 9 pm the computers came back to life and we were released with our passports. With tremendous relief we piled back onto the boat and continued motoring down the Mekong, now in the pitch darkness.
I was kind of freaked out to learn that the boat didn’t have headlights. It had some running lights so other boats could see us but they weren’t very bright. The rest of the river traffic was mostly much bigger boats and ships carrying freight that could have run us over with hardly a bump.
I was sitting near the bow and noticed that the pilot couldn’t see very well because spray kept covering the windshield. Our tour guide stood up and tried to keep up with the spray by wiping storm the windshield from the side with a towel. That didn’t work. Then he helped out by shining a bright flashlight out the front door to illuminate the water ahead. Each time a boat approached head on he would wave the flashlight at them until they flashed back. Reassuring?
After about an hour we turned of the Mekong into a small canal and finally reached our hotel in Chau Doc around 10:30 pm. Another extremely long day. The hotel had an incredible dinner waiting for us because the guide had called ahead, but Jennifer and I were too exhausted to eat. We gave up and went to sleep.
 |
| Surrendering our passports at the Cambodian border 4 pm. We didn’t know we’d be there for 5 hours! |
 |
| Sure crazy with junk food in the hot, humid darkness |
17 January: Chau Doc to Ut Ouynh Guest House
After breakfast we visited a temple where people leave offerings to a Mother Goddess. The temple and the Goddess predate Chinese (Confucian) influence and hark back to a time thousands of years ago when the Viet people were matriarchal.
The temple was thronged by pilgrims and surrounded by busy shops where people bought pigs, fancy clothing, liquor, and other gifts to present to the Goddess. The bustling city appeared quite prosperous and presented a stark contrast to the relative poverty of the Cambodian countryside we’d traveled through the previous days.
We took another hour-long bus ride and our guide explained more of the history of Vietnam.
After 1000 of Chinese domination, Vietnam achieved independence in 938. In subsequent centuries they fought the Cham in what’s now the mountainous central part of Vietnam, the Khmer in the south (Mekong Delta), and the Thai in the west.
The north was and still is strongly influenced by Confucian ideals of filial piety and obedience but the south leans more toward individual freedom and matriarchy. The hot wet south can grow a crop of rice from seed to harvest in 3.5 months so turns three complete cups a year, whereas the colder north can only grow one. This has produced realtime wealth in the south compared to the north for centuries. The guide claimed that these regional cultural roots, along with the reaction to French, Japanese, Soviet, US, and Chinese imperialism, explains some of the chaos of the 20th Century in the region.
At lunchtime we boarded another boat in the Mekong and motored further down the delta. The boat had a long table and all 23 of us were seated there for a lovely lunch as we traveled. We passed downstream through a mostly industrial region with lots of factories and big shipping facilities.
At sunset we toured a remarkable pottery factory on an island in the river. Employees showed us very labor-intensive finishing of heavy clay in huge molds to make plant pots and garden decorations that are very familiar from garden and landscaping stores in the US. The pots are dried for a few weeks and then stacked in huge kilns two stories deep. The kilns are fired with rice husks that heat the interior for 15 days, then sealed to keep the heat in for another 4 days. Then the doors are opened and they cool for another 10 days. Workers go into the kilns when there’re still 60 Celsius (140 F) to remove the pots. Even the outdoor air here makes me wilt, so I can hardly imagine the heat of working in this factory so that cheap clay pots can be sold at Home Depot.
That evening we stayed in a lovely 100+ year old guest house on the island which was kind of rustic but redolent with wooden charm. After dinner we walked through the gardens with little oil lamps and then enjoyed a local performance of folk music and theater.
 |
| A “wise-eyed boat” on the Mekong River |
 |
| Aimee and Abby posing on the riverboat |
 |
| Jayla and Ai drinking coconut water |
 |
| Rice husks burning to fire the kiln |
18 January: Village bicycling and return to the ship
In the morning we crossed the Mekong and mounted bicycles for a wonderful tour of an island village along narrow tracks, some of which were dirt and gravel. It was great to see village life from this perspective, which was very different from what we could see from the either the boat or a bus on a highway.
On the bikes, we passed through lots of small farms and gardens grow jack fruit, durian, mangoes, bananas, and other fruits I didn’t recognize. The area is more and more affected by saltwater intrusion even though it’s more than 120 km upstream from the ocean. Rice has becoming much more difficult to grow so smallholder fruit is taking its place. The situation will get much worse if the Chinese complete a canal in Cambodia that will divert about 70% of the flow of the Mekong.
We visited the little village of Cai Be where we watched coconut and rice products being made and packaged and then ate a nice lunch. Then we boarded a bus for the 2.5 hour drive back to Ho Chi Minh City.
Five days down the Mekong from Tonle Sap to Cai Be felt like 10. We boarded the MV World Odyssey about 3 PM, beating the student crowds. It felt really decadent being back to air conditioning and showers and brushing teeth with tap water.
When we go on these in-country trips I almost forget about life on the ship and the fact that I have a busy job. Then we plunge right back into the day-to-day routine of classes and life at sea. The meta-rhythm of sea leg, country sojourn, sea leg takes a while to establish, and this was our first country.
Now on to Malaysia!
Posts
